“They eat pets” – one other example of how US politicians denigrate Haiti and Haitian immigrants

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance continues to defend the false claim that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, kidnapped and ate Cats and dogs in the world.

This unusual idea was thoroughly exposed since former President Donald Trump repeatedly raised it as an argument against immigrants within the presidential debate on September 12, 2024. Trump never mentioned where the migrants who allegedly “ate the pets” got here from, but many viewers understood it as Reference to Haitiansa population that Trump previously demoted.

As debate moderator David Muir explained in his real-time fact check, there is no such thing as a evidence that pets are being taken or consumed. NPR And other media have also voiced the rumor that began with local right-wing advocates and officials in Springfield criticizing the town’s disorganized response to an influx of Haitian migrants in recent timesto be improper.

Republicans' false rumors about Haitians in Springfield reflect a protracted history of prejudice against Haitians within the United States. Scholar of Haitian history and literatureI even have identified three anti-Haitian ideas prevalent within the United States that can help put the story of Springfield into context.

1. The inability of Haitians to “govern themselves”

In July 1915, US President Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti under the pretext Restoring order and economic stability after the assassination of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.

Five years after the beginning of a 19 years of military occupationThe American diplomat and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson was sent by the NAACP to research the alleged advantages of the occupation. His clear conclusion: “The United States has abandoned Haiti.”

In related pieces for The Nation And The crisisJohnson reported abuses starting from extrajudicial killings of Haitian residents – Between 1915 and 1934, US forces killed 15,000 Haitians – to harass and rape Haitian women. Johnson said the US occupation was nothing greater than a belief within the “inability of the Haitian people to govern themselves”.

By undermining Haitian sovereignty, Wilson’s government had successfully a justification for taking control of Haitian banks, the rewriting of the structure and the introduction of American Jim Crow-style racial segregation within the capital, Port-au-Prince. This was a clearly racist presidential administration that hosted the White House Screenings of DW Griffiths' anti-black film “Birth of a Nation””, as historian Yveline Alexis writes in her book “Haiti Strikes Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte.”

“Racism,” Alexis writes, “was at the heart of the occupation of Haiti and all interactions with Haitians.”

2. The “4H disease”

In June 2017, Trump reportedly stormed a gathering on immigration from Haiti and repeated a slanderous anti-Haitian claim: “They all have AIDS”, he said.

The report by writer Jake Johnston, a senior research fellow on the Center for Economic and Policy Research, shows that the then-president repeated a falsehood that has been circulating because the HIV outbreak within the Nineteen Eighties.

Since a lot of Haitians fell ailing while in a Immigration penal complex in Florida In June 1982, Haitians became a part of what the late public health expert Paul Farmer called the “geography of guilt” who linked this highly contagious disease to certain places and other people.

The German government has turned a small outbreak of disease right into a migration policy aimed toward keeping Haitians out of the United States

Between 1981 and 1991, greater than 27,000 Haitian asylum seekers fleeing the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier were intercepted and detained off the coast of FloridaThe overwhelming majority were repatriated, partly on account of Deportation agreement with Duvalier and partly because detaining Haitians at sea was a “screening strategy” to forestall the spread of HIV/AIDS within the United States.

The Reagan administration called the virus “4H disease”, meaning Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, and heroin addicts. This label spread harmful lies about 4 groups, but Haitians were the one nationality identified as a population “at risk” for HIV/AIDS infection.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed Haitians from the list of highest-risk groups By 1985, the damage had already been done. Haitians within the USA were literally demonized as carriers of a deadly virus.

As a young Haitian in Port-au-Prince remarked to author Martha Cooley in 1983: “This 4H thing is just another way to keep us out.”

3. Haiti’s problems are home-made

Haiti's Profession by foreign forces has continued in various forms because the US invasion in 1915.

United Nations troops were stationed They had lived there for nearly twenty years after President Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in 2004. After the devastating earthquake in 2010, they were joined by the Red Cross And OxfamAs all three organisations have now acknowledged, their humanitarian interventions left behind quite a few crises, including cholera, chronic corruption in reconstruction projects and a marketplace for the sexual exploitation of young girls.

Nevertheless, Haiti has long been accused of home-made instability. In the US, the country is widely portrayed as a hopeless case that’s unable to administer its own affairs. Trump himself once described the country as a “shithole”.

Haitians are currently grappling with overlapping crises, all of which bear an American signature.

After President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in July 2021, the Biden administration selected Haiti's interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry as its recent leader. This undemocratic Decision was such a convincing failure that in March 2024, Haitian gangs revolted against Henry's government, unleashing a wave of brutal violence that ultimately forced Henry from office.

So many disasters in Haiti within the last 4 a long time have a overwhelming feeling of insecurity amongst his people. Many Hundreds of 1000’s have fled the country for the USA, Dominican Republic, Brazil and beyond.

In July 2024, the Biden administration Granting of temporary protection status for 500,000 Haitian migrants within the United States and allowed them to remain within the country in recognition of the life-threatening conditions of their homeland.

The people Trump claims are “illegal aliens” are in reality US residents from a rustic that’s American interference in politics.

A really old pattern

By barking about cats and dogs in Springfield, Trump, Vance and their right-wing supporters are spreading the identical form of anti-Haitian rhetoric which has fuelled a dangerous distrust of Haitian migrants for over a century.

“This is not the first time that we [Haitians] have become victims of 'yon kanpay manti',” said the Ministry for Haitians Living Abroad in a press release following the debatewhich is the Haitian Creole phrase for “a campaign of lies.”

The results of such misinformation is “abuse, hatred and misunderstanding in the interest of politics,” it said.